Day 14: Connection and Healing Across Time
Finding Faith & Forgiveness
My Granny, my dad’s mom, passed away in June 2023. I happened to be home in Canada when she passed—otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to attend her celebration of life. I hadn’t really talked to her in the three years leading up to her passing.
During those three years, I’d spent most of my time abroad, with international travel restricted due to COVID. That distance was one reason we became disconnected. But even before that, my relationship with Granny was complicated. Whilst I saw her regularly growing up, my parents had always kept me at a bit of a distance from her because of some of her choices and behaviours that caused a lot of harm to people in my family. Generational trauma runs deep.
When I was a teenager, something happened legally within my family that caused my parents to decide to officially cut off my contact with her. They wouldn’t tell me what had occurred, so I only knew that she was no longer part of my life. It was confusing, and it took me years to begin understanding. This wasn’t an isolated experience for me—there were other relatives I was distanced from too from my dad’s family. My dad’s brother, for example, lived in the same city as me growing up, but when I was 14, we became estranged from him due to dangerous behaviour.
The reason I stopped talking to Granny between 2020 and 2023 actually didn’t have to do with any one thing in particular she’d done to me. My dad had hurt me, and I cut off ties with him for a period of time while we both healed. (We are now reconnected again, which is so special for me.) At the time when I was angry at him, my anger toward him gradually shifted toward her. I blamed her for his behavior, thinking, If she hadn’t done what she did to him as a child/adult, we’d have a better relationship. I decided it was her fault.
Last year I heard a lyric from Noah Kahan’s song Growing Sideways, and it was basically referencing this:
“I’m still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them.”
I don’t write about this in my book, Sober Yoga Girl, because it’s too complicated. I also just didn’t feel it was appropriate to publish these parts of my family story. For me, living by the principle of ahimsa—causing no harm—meant not telling this story. But Granny wrote parts of it herself in her books.
When she passed, my dad wrote a beautiful obituary, which reminded me of all the incredible things about her—and how much I am like her. No one person is all hero or villain. She was brilliant, beautiful, strong, opinionated, open-minded, and charismatic. She was endlessly curious and loved to ask questions. She packed a lot into her lifetime—modeling, raising four kids, surviving an accident that broke her spine and learning to walk again over 2.5 years, earning a PhD after becoming a parent, writing eight books, and recovering from breast cancer.
In her later years, Granny wrote two memoirs I knew of: Surviving Life and Getting to Heaven. My dad says she wrote about six more academic books that I’d probably like, too. Surviving Life resonated with me in my early twenties, but it also hurt. She wrote something along the lines of (and don’t quote me on this as I don’t have the book in front of me right now, but I’m pretty sure something like this): “If you’d ask me if I’d do it all again, I’d say I wouldn’t do it.” I interpreted that as her regretting motherhood, which made me feel resentful, and I almost used it to prove my point about what kind of person I thought she was.
Now, I understand more. So many women of her generation lived lives they didn’t choose. They were stuck, often forced into marriages and motherhood. I think that’s what she meant by that line.
I didn’t read Getting to Heaven until recently. For years, I thought it was a guidebook on how to get to heaven, and I dismissed it. I didn’t think she was someone I’d want to take advice from in that area.
This past year, though, I’ve been exploring faith. I wrote on Instagram about feeling depressed during the conflict in Gaza:
“As I watched bombs rain down from the sky onto innocent people, I felt helpless. I heard a Macklemore lyric that said, ‘I never believed in God, but things got so fucked up that I had to pray.’ That’s when I started to pray.”
I’ve since been immersed in classes on Patanjali’s Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Buddha Dharma, studying the Qur’an, and learning about the 12 steps. I’m fascinated by how different spiritual traditions approach faith, and I’ve been drawing connections between them.
In November, I was walking with my sister after dropping off her daughter at daycare, explaining the philosophical contrasts between Buddhism and Sankhya (the basis of Hinduism and the Yoga Sutras). I was rambling on about how Buddhists believe in “nothingness” while yogis believe in “infinity,” (I’ll tell you more about what I mean by that if you join my Yoga Sutra Study!) when my sister said, “You know who would have loved this conversation? Granny.”
That comment hit me. My sister was right. If Granny was alive, she would have loved talking with me about this. She always loved big ideas and deep discussions about religion. That’s what her PhD was in. Comparative Religion. Each day, I start to see more and more of myself in her, and I feel more connected to her.
On my flight back to Bali, I finally read Getting to Heaven. It wasn’t what I expected—it was a collection of reflections, questions she’d asked people about life after death, and her own thoughts on the subject. She wasn’t explaining how to get to heaven; she was searching for answers, trying to figure it out herself. She doesn’t outright say it, but I am sure she had some regrets (like all of us), and she was probably processing her life through her work.
One passage stood out:
“I had the occasion to ask my dear son Charles this question yesterday when we were out for lunch.
He said something quite poignant to me when I asked him about his thoughts on heaven. He said, ‘Well, I will not go to heaven when I die. My place is already reserved for me in Dante’s weeping forest. I will weep for my sins eternally.’ And then, he added, ‘It’s not so bad, really, for it is the tears produced by sinners in the weeping forest that provide the water for heaven.’”
This made me so sad—to think my dad’s brother believes his mistakes are irreparable. But, as I drove on the motorbike ride home today, I couldn’t help but think - in many ways, this is kind of what I am doing to myself right now. I’m transporting myself back to some pretty bad choices I made, and trapping myself in them, thinking that they will forever define who I am.
Last night, after I was talking about all of this to a friend, she said: “I get what’s happening. You’re trying to figure out who you are right now, and at the same time, you are reading a book about something you did in active addiction. You think it’s who you are. But that’s not who you are. That’s something you did.”
I said,
“But I really fucked up his life.”
She said,
“Did you fuck up his life? Or did you fuck up a moment in his life?”
“I mean, I guess you’re right,” I said. “His life is fine now. He’s married. He has kids.”
“Exactly,” she said. “You didn’t fuck up his life. And you are not that person. Because if you were a bad, malicious person, you wouldn’t be sitting here crying about it eight years later.”
We can change. Mistakes aren’t permanent. That’s one of the key teachings of yoga. It’s making amends in 12 steps. It’s healing our karma.
Yoga teaches that mistakes are repairable. Yoga teaches that you have many lifetimes to make up for your mistakes. You actually have infinite lifetimes to do so. And you can start now! We accrue karma in our lifetime but it isn’t permanent. Each day, we have a choice to add to our negative karma, or take away from our negative karma, to bring ourselves closer and closer to kaivalya, liberation. I believe for most of us, we have too much karma to correct in one lifetime. But that’s ok - that’s why we have more lifetimes - and all the work we do in this lifetime will transfer to the next. (This is all taught in the Yoga Sutra Study course, too.) Karma isn’t permanent.
As my teacher Rolf Gates writes:
“Yoga is the conscious manipulation of karma. It is the study of how to avoid injurious karma and how to accrue positive karma. The ultimate aim of yoga is to transcend this web of karma so we can reunite with our divinity.”
The last thing I’ll share is that today, I did my first Harmonium lesson with my new teacher Diana. I asked her if we could chant to Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, for our first class. We talked about how Saraswati is the goddess of healing and letting go. Here’s a video of me chanting it for the first time (with some mistakes and Diana’s help in the background!)
On the motorbike ride home, I was thinking about how much my Granny loved to write and how she used writing to process and heal. It made me think of her books and my own writing. Saraswati, I realized, embodies the very act of storytelling—of transforming pain into wisdom.
I’ve come to believe I’m living the life Granny might have dreamed of if she’d been born in my generation. And I wonder if that’s why she helped me pay for my yoga teacher training in Mexico over ten years ago. It feels like her way of supporting a version of freedom she never had. And I sometimes feel like I’m breaking the generational trauma by choosing that path.
When I think of her now, I think of a woman who was searching, like me, for peace and understanding. I think of her writing, her questions, and her struggles. And I hope, wherever she is, that she has found her way to heaven.